Thursday 25th September

Firstly let me apologise for spoiling your breakfast.  I should perhaps have written about Ed Milliband and “Together”, but his rather thoughtful speech was upstaged by yet another War.  So far this year we have had Ukraine, South Sudan, Syria, Gaza, Iraq and now Syria again.  Not bad for the twenty-first Century, and I must apologise for any wars I have missed along the way.  It is quite confusing these days.

And now an unbelievable amount of heavy weaponry, including in all probability depleted uranium and many other cancer-causing agents has been unleashed on a country that is barely a country at all now.  Syria has been torn apart by a civil war which we helped to fund and arm and support, in essence to get rid of Bashar Assad, who our media has painted as another Middle Eastern Tyrant  ‘a-la-Saddam or Gadhafi’, and which we thought we might win easily without actually getting our troops involved.  We narrowly missed out on committing our soldiers to fight for the rebels a couple of years ago, but now the very lunatics we were supporting have turned out to be the enemy.  Just as in Afghanistan where the Taliban were created by us to fight the Ruskies and then turned on the hand that fed them, so Isis – or call it what you will is winning and killing Christians and unbelievers in their particular brand of Islam and so America has decided to not only “defend” Iraq, but to bomb them in Syria too.

What no-one actually explains is that this is killing.  Hundreds of thousands will die, possibly millions be displaced, homes, hospitals and schools destroyed, a whole already battered nation will be pummeled to death.  And for what?  To try to stop an ideaology.  To kill an idea.  What the West fails to acknowledge is that we created Isis.  By our barbaric attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, by our constant crusade against Muslims we alienated young people who we are now killing.  And for each one we kill, we will wake up on another day at some time in the near future with another war on our plate.